SIZING AND GEOMETRY OPTIMIZATION OF CABLE-STAYED BRIDGES

This paper describes a method which sets steel cable-stayed bridge design in a multi-objective optimization context with goals of minimum cost and stress. The cable anchor positions on the main girder and pylon and the cross-sectional sizes of the structural members are dealt with as design variables. A Pareto solution is found by means of an entropy-based optimization algorithm. Illustrative examples for both the fixed and variable geometry problems show the significance of dealing with cable anchor positions as design variables. The influence of the stresses arising during the erection procedure on the optimum solutions is also emphasized.